New spy book names Engelbert Broda as KGB atomic spy in Britain

Based on secret KGB documents, it names Engelbert Broda, an Austrian physicist and secret communist sympathiser, as a mole who worked at Britain's Cavendish nuclear laboratory.

Codenamed "Eric" by his Russian handlers, he is believed to have passed thousands of pages of top secret documents about British and American atomic research to Moscow, and was regarded as one of the Soviet Union's most valuable moles. He demanded no payment for his services, and would meet his handlers up to three times a week to pass details of the "tube alloys project", as the nuclear project was officially known.

Eric's true identity has been a matter of speculation for decades. But Spies, the Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, which draws heavily on previously undisclosed Soviet-era intelligence documents, alleges that he was definitely Broda, who fled Austria after Hitler annexed it in 1938.